Showing Spotlights 313 - 320 of 332 in category All (newest first):
As it is becoming clearer that one of the critical issues for developing functional nanomachines is the generation of energy required to power them, research into developing nanoscale energy sources has been picking up substantially. The energy to be fed into a nanogenerator is likely to be mechanical energy that is converted into electric energy that then will be used to power nanodevices without using a battery. With the emergence of nanotechnology and the use of nanomaterials, the field of piezoelectrics and nanopiezotronics has experienced a lot of new and interesting research efforts. Researchers in Korea have now demonstrated the first use of chemical vapor deposition-grown large-scale graphene sheets as transparent electrodes for fully transparent and flexible nanogenerators.
Apr 19th, 2010
Silicon has dominated solid-state electronics for more than four decades but now a variety of other materials are being explored in photonic devices to expand the wavelength range of operation and to improve performance. Graphene is such a material - although most research on graphene so far has focused mainly on electronics. IBM researchers have now shown that graphene-based devices can be used in optical communications. Introducing this new material system into photonics could have a significant impact on mainstream optical applications. By using graphene, researchers make use of the internal electric field that exists at the interface of graphene and metal. Through a sophisticated combination of palladium and titanium electrodes they created a photodetector that does not rely on external current.
Apr 7th, 2010
Carbon-supported catalysts are widely used in many applications. For example, platinum nanoparticles supported on bulk carbon frameworks are used as fuel cell electrodes. The obvious challenge is to have a large area of carbon surface so that the catalyst particles can be dispersed without any aggregation. Graphene with its 2D nanostructure provides a large surface area (theoretically, the surface area of graphene is about 2600 square meters per gram) to anchor catalyst particles. Scientists have now succeeded in dispersing two different types of nanoparticles - silver and titanium dioxide - on a reduced graphene oxide at different sites without any aggregation.
Jan 21st, 2010
A group of researchers from Singapore, led by Professor Dingyuan Tang from Nanyang Technological University and Professor Kian Ping Loh from National University of Singapore, have reported the first breakthrough in using few-layer graphene as a saturable absorber for the mode locking of lasers. Despite its prominent mechanical and electrical properties, graphene's optical response has previously been considered to be weak and featureless, so the main interests of the research community are centered on its electronics properties. But now, Tang and Loh demonstrate that graphene can be used for telecommunications applications and that its weak and universal optical response might be turned into advantages for ultrafast photonics applications.
Jan 6th, 2010
Graphene based sheets such as pristine graphene, graphene oxide, or reduced graphene oxide are basically single atomic layers of carbon network. They are the world's thinnest materials. A general visualization method that allows quick observation of these sheets would be highly desirable as it can greatly facilitate sample evaluation and manipulation, and provide immediate feedback to improve synthesis and processing strategies. Current imaging techniques for observing graphene based sheets include atomic force microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and optical microscopy. Some of these techniques are rather low-throughput. And all the current techniques require the use of special types of substrates. This greatly limits the capability to study these materials. Researchers from Northwestern University have now reported a new method, namely fluorescence quenching microscopy, for visualizing graphene-based sheets.
Dec 14th, 2009
Chip structures already have reached nanoscale dimensions but as they continue to shrink below the 20 nanometer mark, ever more complex challenges arise and scaling appears not to be economically feasible any more. And below 10 nm, the fundamental physical limits of CMOS technology will be reached.
One promising material that could enable the chip industry to move beyond the current CMOS technology is graphene, a monolayer sheet of carbon. Notwithstanding the intense research interest, large scale production of single layer graphene remains a significant challenge. Researchers at Cornell University have now reported a new technique for producing large scale single layer graphene sheets and fabricating transistor arrays with uniform electrical properties directly on the device substrate.
Dec 2nd, 2009
Graphene is an impressive condensed matter system that, to all appearances, never ceases to impress and challenge our entrenched intuitions regarding solid state systems. But graphene is a highly atypical electronic system in that it consists of nothing but a surface. Researchers at Boston University have found that local deformations in a graphene sheet can strongly influence electron flow across the system, causing suppression of conductance at low densities, and making electrons behave as if they were living in a nanoribbon or quantum dot. All this without cutting the graphene sheet, which opens the prospect towards a reversible and controllable transport gap in monolayer graphene via strain engineering.
Oct 6th, 2009
Nanostructures present novel material properties and interesting insight into new physical phenomena. However, from a technical and commercial application point of view, a successful bridging between the nanoscale specific significance with large-scale applications must be made to obtain these benefits. One of the 'hottest' nanomaterials at the moment is graphene, a one-atom thick sheet of carbon. Ribbons made from graphene, basically stripes that look like molecular chicken wire, show even more unconventional properties than graphene, especially when they are less than 100 nm wide. Any material approach to use graphene nanoribbons for larger-scale applications must be able to assemble them into macroscopic materials, while preserving their physical significance and novel properties at these larger scales. Researchers at MIT have addressed this issue by proposing hierarchical assemblies of graphene nanoribbons through hydrogen bonds, inspired by biological structures found in nature such as proteins and DNA macromolecules.
Oct 2nd, 2009
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